National Defence Committee on Nov. 25th, 2010

[David Chartrand]

So they're giving us access--

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

We do have the right to access and use all of the intellectual property in the airplane but only if we are within the MOU.

[David Chartrand]

That's only if we are paying contracts?

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

That's only if we are members of the memorandum of understanding.

[David Chartrand]

Okay.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

That's only if we are participating members. You can accept what I just said or not. That is within the MOU. If that is the case, would you see a danger in not being within the MOU and the fact that we wouldn't have access to that intellectual property to develop our industries for the next level of technology and whatever comes next?

[David Chartrand]

Sir, I'm not here to say whether it was a good idea or not to be part of it, and to invest money there, whether it gave us access or not. What I'm here to state--and I know you'd like a clear-cut answer, yes or no--is that pretty much what should be included in the memorandum of agreement is that we're going to get back dollar for dollar here in jobs.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

What if, through the industrial participation plans, which are part of the MOU, we have the opportunity to get much more than dollar for dollar?

[David Chartrand]

If we have the opportunity to get much more and it's guaranteed, that's good.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Is anything in life guaranteed?

[David Chartrand]

There are actually two things that are guaranteed: you're eventually going to die and you're always going to pay taxes.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

That's absolutely right.

Whether the opportunity to participate in a 3,000- to 5,000-plane global supply chain with its accompanying opportunities is better than having guarantees for a fleet of 65 airplanes, I guess you can make your own value judgment. But Canadian industry, the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada and CADSI and the thousand or so companies they represent, I would suggest to you, have made that value judgment, because they have unanimously supported the acquisition of the F-35 under the memorandum of understanding that we're part of at this point.

[David Chartrand]

Canadian companies probably have a difficult time coming up here and stating certain things against McDonnell Douglas, against the Boeing corporation, or against these companies, because by doing that, they're reducing their chances of obtaining any work. I don't have those concerns coming here and saying that we should have had a memorandum of agreement or we shouldn't have; we should have dealt with Lockheed Martin or we shouldn't have; we should have been in this project or not; and we should have invested that money. It doesn't bother me to say those things.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Sure, that's fine. I think you'd find it doesn't bother them either.

Do you think if countries like Canada and Italy and Turkey and the Netherlands and Norway and Denmark and Australia and England and Israel have had experts, military and civilian, looking at a particular problem or options and they've all come up with the same conclusion, that's a coincidence, or do you think maybe there's some truth behind what they've come up with?

[David Chartrand]

I couldn't tell you, sir. I don't know.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Mr. LeBlanc, you have five minutes.

[Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal, Beauséjour, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Maybe I'll give Mr. Dias, if he wants to come back--

[Jerome Dias]

I would love to respond.

[Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal, Beauséjour, NB]

I'll tell you what. I have a question for Mr. Chartrand, and then I'll save enough time at the end, because I'd be curious to hear your response to Mr. Hawn's question.

Monsieur Chartrand, in your opening comments, I thought there was something interesting. I think we've understood clearly your views with respect to guaranteed industrial and regional benefits, which equate to jobs and investment in Canada as opposed to a chance to compete with a number of other partner countries our proportionate share of the procurement, the overall procurement being what it is. I share your view. I think a guarantee represents a better opportunity for workers and for the Canadian industry.

But I wanted you to expand, if you could, with enough time for Mr. Dias to answer Mr. Hawn's question, on the idea that the maintenance and the repair and the inflight support need to be done by Canadian companies. You referred to L-3, which I think is a great example of a world-class leader in that kind of work. You raised some safety issues or some concerns that you'd have if we were subcontracting or allowing other countries or other companies that perhaps don't have the same capacities as our own or the same verification that our own might to do that work. I wanted to better understand that point.

[David Chartrand]

The example I'm going to use is Bombardier. It used to use companies like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to build parts of their planes--subcontract. They actually still use other companies, but that's one clear example. When Boeing ramped up its production levels, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries didn't have the manpower. It didn't have the capabilities of doing both and delivering on schedule, so they told Bombardier, which was a smaller contractor, “Hold on. You'll get your stuff later.” They made Bombardier wait for long periods of time. Bombardier had to send teams down there to finish their products, to get their products on time.

Well, picture that with our military planes. We're talking about sovereignty. We're talking about protecting our families. We're talking about patrolling the north, the Arctic. We're talking about all these things. Now we're getting our planes serviced by another country, which is also servicing their planes. There's a war. There's something going on. Don't you think they'd have an interest to put their planes in the sky before ours? I believe so. I think that's quite simple to understand. It doesn't take a great scientist for that.

If I were the Americans, I'd be looking around, or if I were somebody else in Europe or wherever, maintaining the planes, I'd say, “Hey, mine are going to go first and yours are going to go second. You hold on and wait. We'll patrol our skies before you can patrol yours.” I have a problem with that.

On the expertise we're talking about, we have a great expertise in doing it. We've done it for over 30 years. We fought to be able to get those contracts. We've bought planes from Lockheed Martin, and they told us we can't maintain our own planes in the Canadian government because there's technology we're not going to be aware of and things like that. Well, as he said, our working on them helps us to develop technologies to stretch out the life of certain aircraft. It helps us develop new technologies. We have an engineering department that works on it and all that.

But by not being able to maintain our planes, we're going to lose that expertise. Right now, the only place we can do that--the F-18s--is in Quebec. We're doing it in Bagotville and we're doing it also in Mirabel. If we do not do it, we're going to lose that expertise.

If we don't do it for so many years, the schools and the programs that teach people how to do it will close down. The people leave—they go somewhere else—and you end up not being able to put it back on track and being able to train those people.

We're talking about the aerospace industry in general. We need to continue being productive and being at the forefront of the industry with all the new technologies. It's our leverage right now. It's our edge.

We'll be honest. Countries like Mexico, and other countries, can produce cheaper. So our edge right now is technology. It's always being the first ones with a new product. It's being able to develop new technologies that are difficult to work on and that we can do by having great programs in schools. If we don't do it, we risk killing programs in our schools and making sure we don't have anybody able to do that in the future.

[Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal, Beauséjour, NB]

Thank you.

Mr. Dias,

If there's any time left, did you want to pick up on Mr. Hawn's question?

[Jerome Dias]

Yes, I would love to.

Mr. Hawn, let me load the questions the way you did. I love your question--

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Sorry, Mr. Dias, we don't have enough time.

Mr. Braid, you have the floor for five minutes, and maybe he'll be able to answer the question.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And thank you to all of our representatives for being here today.

I think one of the main messages we heard from you was about job protection and job creation. I can tell you that I certainly share that interest and that concern. That's one of the reasons this government is participating in this program.

Amongst the unions you're involved with, and your union membership, I'm curious to know whether there are any members who are involved in high-tech companies, or high-tech work in the aerospace industry--software, for example? That's what I mean by high-tech.

[Jerome Dias]

From a straight high-tech point of view, we have MacDonald Dettwiler, which obviously is predominant in space. We have our members at Bombardier Aerospace. We have our AMEs; we have people who sign off aircraft. But off the top of my head, none of our members I can think of are dealing with intellectual software.